Pure Storage says it’s launching another FlashArray system on December 8.
The marketing blurb gushes about “an entirely new level of performance to the FlashArray family, powering the next era of cloud-like scale with Pure Fusion. Delivering performance and agility never before seen behind the firewall, the new FlashArray platform is designed to support your most demanding business-critical applications. It’s your power and your cloud.”
A launch microsite provides a few clues about the new system in its text:
The implication here is that the new FlashArray will be a scale-out and scale-up system. Witness this text: “Power more business services with bigger databases, more users, and more app workloads — all on fewer arrays.”
We are told the new systems will “blow past current IOPS, latency, and throughput targets”. That surely means faster controller processors, faster internal networking and external network access speeds, and data access from quicker responding media. Thus the lower latency claim.
The current FlashArray//X can use Optane storage-class memory for caching which enables its latency to be “as low as 100µs”.
Pure Fusion is a way of federating Pure devices, on- and off-premises, with a cloud-like hyperscaler consumption model. It includes a self-service, autonomous, SaaS management plane, enhanced Pure1 operational management, and Portworx Data Services (PDS).
FlashArray//X release 3
There are two FlashArray// systems currently: the //X R3 family and low end //C products. The R3 family consists of the //X10, //X20, //X50, //X70 and //X90 models along with a DirectFlash Shelf.
We believe we are looking at a fourth release of the FlashArray//X family with non-disruptive upgrades to the new range, probably by controller swap-outs, with the new controllers using later generation Xeon (or AMD) CPUs. There may also be new and higher-capacity flash drives in the systems.
Register for the launch event here.
